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The weather is slowly turning spring-like, and that means that students will soon be meeting with advisors to plan their fall schedules. As undergraduates think about their future studies, they can also still plan to take a summer class (or two). There’s plenty to learn; it can help one flesh out one’s schedule — or even save big bucks by graduating early. As Jennifer Curran recently announced:

Many students take Summer Session courses to fulfill major requirements, to give themselves more scheduling options during the year, or to take advantage of the quieter campus, smaller class sizes, and intense focus on just one or two topics at a time. 

Summer course information is online at http://wesleyan.edu/summer/curriculum/index.html and also in Wesmaps: https://iasext.wesleyan.edu/regprod/!wesmaps_page.html?summer_crse_list=&term=1176

Registration is open now. To register, students print out a form found in their portfolio, fill it out, get a signature from their advisor, then submit it to the Continuing Studies office with tuition payment. 

If you or your advisees need any additional assistance, please contact us at 860-685-2005 or summer@wesleyan.edu.

There is a wide variety of classes this summer, from screenwriting and painting to biology and chemistry. Session One is from May 29-July 1st. Session Two July 6-August 4.

Update: Happy April Fools’ Day!

While lots of people are focused on the change of mascots at Wesleyan—we’ve been the Cardinals for more than 100 years and we are shifting to the squirrel—I want to talk about something serious.

Grade Inflation

The average grade at Wesleyan, like many other colleges and universities in our peer group, has crept up over the years. We are at an A- now, and like many of the Ivies and NESCAC schools we give more “As” than any other grade.

This ends today.

I have met with faculty leadership and we have made a decision. Effective immediately, we are implementing the reverse curve.  We must find a way to keep students engaged and stimulated. From now on, all grades will be reduced by a full letter. If your work traditionally would have received an A+ from your professor, it will now be a B+; a B+ will become a C+, and so on. This reverse curve can be avoided by taking everything Pass/Fail.

I know this will be unpopular, but in the long run it will be better for all of us, and especially for pragmatic liberal education in America. Getting high grades is a form of privilege, and we should no longer participate in this charade of normative, hierarchical thinking. I know the Wesleyan family, a caring and forward-thinking community that prides itself on fairness, will eventually thank me.

We will EXPAND RECOGNITION of Wesleyan as a National Leader in the struggle against grade inflation.

We are investigating whether, and to what extent, we can make this retroactive. We have hired a great group of lawyers from the Federal Liaison in the Undertaking of National Knowledge  — a new initiative from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — to help us in this regard. Starting today, we turn the tide back against the privilege of high grades.

Yesterday afternoon I sent the following message to the Wesleyan community:

Dear friends,

Welcome back from spring break! As we move toward the end of the year, I want to report back on two important developments in our Equity and Inclusion work: the external review of Wesleyan’s Title IX policies and procedures, and our plans to open a student Resource Center.

I want to express my appreciation to the Victim Rights Law Center (VRLC) for providing us with a comprehensive assessment of the ways in which our Title IX policies and practices affect students, faculty, and staff. The VRLC addresses three major themes: reorganization, training, and communication. We must ensure that staff roles are appropriate and clear; offer additional training to help all members of our community better understand our processes; and assure that our policies and procedures are clear and easy to find. The report offers much more detail that I hope will stimulate robust discussion and actions by the relevant offices.

The VRLC suggests several improvements. We need to build trust in our people and processes and reduce complexity wherever possible. We are working with appropriate committees on specific recommendations. The report also notes that our students have strong peer support, faculty members are committed and engaged, our partnerships with community agencies are strong, and the campus community, in its culture and conversations, understands the importance of Title IX related issues. We have work to do, but we can build on these strengths.

Another important step in our efforts to enhance inclusiveness on campus is the creation of a student Resource Center to advocate for students through a mission grounded in social justice with an awareness of what students require to thrive. I want to thank the members of the Equity & Inclusion Steering Committee for envisioning how the Resource Center, as their report notes, will help to meet the needs of students who are most vulnerable, maintain awareness of matters related to intolerance and inaccessibility, and empower collective work to address root issues of injustice and inequity. In this regard we will be helped by our new Dean for Equity & Inclusion, Teshia Levy-Grant, who has extensive experience in anti-bias education in and out of the classroom.

We will soon begin a search for a director of the Resource Center, and we have identified a space (the current Shapiro Creative Writing Center) that we will renovate for opening next fall, a year ahead of the original schedule.

Finally, I would like to solicit comments on Beyond 2020, the addendum to our strategic plan. The document is organized around the three overarching goals of our 2010 plan—energizing the distinctive Wesleyan education experience, building recognition of the university, and maintaining a sustainable economic model. The current draft has greater specificity about investments in faculty, financial aid, and facilities—investments made possible by the success of our THIS IS WHY campaign.

As the semester comes to an activity-filled close, I look forward to welcoming admitted students during WesFest, cheering on our spring athletic teams, and celebrating the many student performances and exhibitions. Commencement will be here before we know it!

Michael S. Roth

President

Every year around this time, as spring break meanders through its second week, I have to express admiration for those students who have been working hard throughout. Of course, there are the athletes who have been competing and practicing. I saw some in the gym this week getting ready for track and field competitions, and I’ve watched some fine games online as our lacrosse, softball, baseball and tennis teams compete in warmer climes.

There are plenty of students on campus holding down jobs in the library, science labs and other places. Do they have a spring break? Well, they have a break from classes, at any rate. And then there are the thesis writers. With the deadline for completion fast approaching, these folks may have what feels to be the shortest breaks of all. Here are some of the projects I’ve heard about through the academic deans and faculty advisors:

There are a whole bunch of C-Film students working in teams on films and individually on criticism projects. I’ll just mention Will McGhee (screenwriting) and Russell Goldman (film making). In art history, Carolina Elices is doing a senior honors thesis for both her majors in English and art history, focusing on the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy’s career as an architect who worked on preservation and restoration of medieval English churches, in the same period that he was creating his renowned novels like Jude the Obscure and Far from the Madding Crowd. 

In chemistry, Eric Arsenault and Prof. Stewart Novick are currently working on a paper almost certainly to be accepted in a special issue of the Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy.  Eric’s research includes the investigation of ring inversion in fluorinated cycloalkenes and the study of molecules containing atoms, particularly iodine, with large nuclear quadrupole coupling tensors. Eric will be joining the Ph.D. program in Chemistry at UC Berkeley in the Fall. Helena Awad, a BA/MA student in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, is trying to understand why mutations in a DNA repair protein lead to colorectal cancer. Her work with Prof. Manju Hingorani involves painstakingly isolating each mutant protein and studying its properties to discover why the mutation disrupts DNA repair and compromises the stability of the genome. 

In English, Emily Apter, is writing a creative thesis involving “blurred genre” essays about 20th century Hartford. Jack Reibstein, is working on a group of short stories and essays about addiction. Miranda Konar, is doing a critical thesis on the history of emotions in Arthurian literature. And there are more!!

I received the following notices about theses in French studies: Alex Lee is writing on his own interaction, as a reader and translator, with French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, and an articulation of this process in the form of new poetry. Noah Mertz‘s “Memorial” is a nonfiction thesis crosslisted in the English and French studies departments that blends personal anecdotes, literary theory, and philosophy on the subject of untimely death. Rachel Rosenman‘s thesis is in French and music. She is writing about the French woman composer Mel Bonis (1858-1937), who remains surprisingly little known, despite leaving behind a considerable oeuvre comprising over 300 works. Rachel will also present a recital of vocal and instrumental chamber works by Bonis in April.

Anna Bisikalo (government/Russian, Eastern European & Eurasian Studies) is writing about the role of women during the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, including some interesting arguments about the way they have re-discovered myths of Ukrainian warrior princesses. She locates this against the backdrop of the transition from Soviet to market economy gender roles, and pushback from Ukrainian feminists against the importation of Western liberal gender models. Jeesue Lee is writing about the selling of the COIN counter-insurgency manual in 2005 as a “new” solution to the stalemate in Iraq, based on selective use of historical analogies – out with Vietnam, in with Malaya. She analyses this policy debate through the prism of counter-factual history, and the way history is used by policy makers. 

Ethan Yaro is writing on the notion of language, its epistemological function and its location in the economy of presence and absence. He presents readings of Condillac and Rousseau, along with the response to them by Herder. Ethan argues that Herder both pre-figures some 20th-century literary theory and offers solutions to some of the problems post-structuralism identifies in Western metaphysics.

Sofi Goode, Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies/ Economics, is working on a thesis titled, “In the Name of Protection: Queerness, Biopolitics, and Carcerality.” Sofi examines the impact of American prison policies that claim to protect incarcerated LGBTQ people. She makes the argument that “by restricting relationships with other incarcerated people and confining queer people in actively dangerous spaces, these policies seek to ensure the normativity of the general population while masking the violence they commit against queer people.” 

Dinayuri Rodriguez‘s anthropology thesis is entitled Revolutionizing the Quotidian: Intersubjective Processes of Self-making in the Dominican Republic and the Dominican Diaspora. Dinayuri is investigating processes of self-making and demonstrates that Dominican artists like Josefina Báez and members of the anarchic collective Cibao Libertario build and enact a relational sense of self through quotidian acts that are not typically understood as “revolutionary” precisely because they are so ordinary.

There are many recitals, exhibitions and performances this spring that are part of senior projects (like Senior Dance Recital the first weekend of April and senior exhibitions which begin April 5th) that you can find here. For example, in theater Jessica Cummings, Constance Des Marais, Nola Werlinich, and Cheyanne Williams have conceived and created Up Your Aesthetic, “a disruptive, devised, women-only performance piece juxtaposing the rage and grief felt by modern women with the Ancient Greek myths of the Amazons.”

UPDATE:

Emma Broder’s SiSP thesis is entitled Whose Lyme Is It Anyway?: Epistemic, Culture, and Experiential Representations of Chronic Lyme Disease. Emma uses discourse analysis to investigate gender representations in the writings of scientists and doctors, patients, experts and celebrities who discuss the condition. In Lying-In to Lying Alone: The Medicalization of Reproduction in the United States, Sally Rappaport explores the emergence of obstetrics and gynecology as medical sciences that wielded expansive control over women’s bodies and reproduction. Deja Knight’s thesis in African American Studies titled Soul Food: The Plight of African American Food Sovereignty, Food Insecurity, and Resistance explains the problem of food insecurity in two Black public housing projects in Baltimore. She uses Geographical Informational Systems and detailed historical analysis to demonstrate the spatial dimensionality of food sovereignty, insecurity, and justice in these communities.

In the week before spring break, Donna Morea, Chair of Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees, announced that I had agree to extend my contract as president of the university through 2023. I am very grateful to the board for this opportunity to continue to work with faculty, students, staff and alumni on behalf of the school I care so deeply about.

Since the summer of 2016 I have been in discussion about an addendum to our 2010 strategic plan, Wesleyan 2020. At the end of the fall semester, after several discussions with various Wesleyan stakeholders, we posted a draft of that addendum. I have continued to receive good feedback on our plans, and at its March meeting the board had an opportunity to see a new draft of what we are calling Beyond 2020. The document remains organized around the three overarching goals of the strategic plan—energizing the distinctive Wesleyan education experience; building recognition of the university; maintaining a sustainable economic model. The current draft, available here, has more specificity about investments in faculty, financial aid, and facilities. Thanks to the generosity of the Wesleyan family through the THIS IS WHY campaign, we have already added significant funding to financial aid, and we are creating new faculty positions that should facilitate research and project-based work for our students. In regard to facilities planning, we are developing a priority list of projects that will improve care of our art collection, enhance the Film Studies Center, dramatically improve the Public Affairs Center and replace a good portion of our science facilities with up-to-date labs and teaching spaces.

I’ve re-written the beginning of Beyond 2020, which I am pasting in here. There is still time for input, as we hope to have this guideline for planning complete before the Annual Meeting in May.

This is a crucial time for higher education in America – full of promise but also of dangers. In some ways, the vitality of the best universities in the United States has never been more apparent. Not only do American research universities dominate the lists of the world’s best educational institutions, students from across the globe have increasingly looked to our schools as the best places to pursue post-secondary learning. At the same time, here at home colleges are often viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility. American universities are facing enormous pressures to demonstrate the cash value of their “product,” while at the same time the recreational side of college life is attracting more attention than ever. To meet enrollment goals or to climb in the rankings many colleges offer the “full spa experience,” while being sure to emphasize the value of what young consumers are learning while enjoying themselves outside the classroom. The curriculum and high-quality instruction may be tolerated but rarely celebrated. These efforts at brand promotion through everything but what happens between faculty and students may be good for short-term appeal, but in the long run it only makes the educational mission of universities more fragile.

At another crucial time in the history of higher education in America, under the leadership of President Victor Butterfield, Wesleyan redefined its role as a center of interdisciplinary learning, a reservoir of innovative research and creative scholarship, and a pioneering advocate for increased access to the empowerment of a liberal education.

When I arrived at Wesleyan for my first year in college, it was almost 10 years after Butterfield had stepped down from the university’s presidency. During his tenure of more than twenty years, Wesleyan had become known as one of the most progressive and innovative schools in America — and one of the wealthiest.  By the time I got to campus in 1975, things had already begun to change. The university was still known for its pioneering ways, its great research output from the sciences to the arts, its demanding and productive faculty, and its creative, rambunctious students. But the giddy spending of the late sixties and early seventies, the inattention to fundraising and a loss of focus on the academic mission, were already eroding the university’s foundation. Over the next decades, our spending habits changed and fundraising did increase. However, the university’s aspirations were still seriously out of sync with its economic capacity.

The beginning of my presidency overlapped with the Great Recession, and since then we have worked to overcome this disjunction. Over the last eight years we have supported the organically developing educational mission of the university while improving the three core components of its economic model: spending, investment, revenue. We did this in conjunction with our strategic plan, Wesleyan 2020, which was adopted by the Board of Trustees in 2010.

The three overarching goals in Wesleyan 2020 are:

• Energize Wesleyan’s distinctive educational experience
• Enhance recognition of Wesleyan as an extraordinary institution
• Work within a sustainable economic model while retaining core values

Although economic issues were at the forefront of our concerns after 2008, the most important priority in our planning and operations has been articulating and supporting our distinctive educational mission: “providing an education in the liberal arts that is characterized by boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.” At the heart of this mission is the faculty’s guidance of students’ intellectual development in ways that enhance their ability to translate academic learning to the world beyond the campus. Whether one is studying mathematics or film, economics or literature, our faculty guides students toward a deeper understanding of themselves and the tools they can use to solve problems and create opportunities beyond the university.

The program for co-curricular learning in a residential setting also aims to develop in students both a greater sense of autonomy and a greater ability to participate in groups. Through their athletic, political, artistic and community engagement activities, Wesleyan students are becoming more independent while also developing life skills that will translate into resources for teamwork, for participating in their local communities, for engaging as citizens, and, most generally, for working with others toward shared goals.

Many universities today tend toward greater specialization. They have gotten really good at education as a form of narrowing, and the public is treated to the spectacle of pointy-headed specialists great at one thing but not to be trusted beyond their small subfield. Of course, advanced work in any area requires rigorous work and real technical competence. But we must not confuse being a competent technician with being an innovative scientist who can make discoveries or a teacher who can inspire students by translating complex technical issues into terms clearly relevant to pressing human concerns. Wesleyan recognizes that in today’s culture and economy we should provide students with intellectual cross-training – an education that strengthens their independence of mind and generosity of spirit in ways that make them better equipped to deal with a rapidly changing world.

Since developing Wesleyan 2020, we have increased our economic capacity so as to be able to pursue our institutional mission with renewed vigor and purpose. In December 2016, we posted a report detailing our progress and where we need to do still more.

2020 is almost upon us, and over the last several months I have been talking with various Wesleyan constituencies about how to extend our framework for strategic planning into the next decade. In this brief document, I outline some of the new investments we can make to ensure that Wesleyan remains at the forefront of pragmatic and liberal education. Through the dedicated work of faculty and staff, we will continue to provide our students with a variety of tools to explore the world, to create opportunities and to solve problems. Wesleyans have long found ways to embrace particular traditions while being open to innovation. Whatever one studies at Wesleyan, one is deepening one’s ability to translate from a campus culture of immersive learning to a life beyond the university.

March 8^th is International Women’s Day. The theme this year is “Be Bold for Change,” encouraging substantial action to help create a more gender inclusive world. This is also the first week of Women’s History Month, and there are many events on campus to related to its themes. Today, March 8th, there is an event to commemorate International Women’s Day at 4:30 p.m. in the Smith Reading Room in Olin Library. It will feature Lois Brown, Madalena Henning, Laura Patey and Krishna Winston, and is organized by Womxn at Wesleyan, and co-sponsored by OEI/Academic Affairs/Student Affairs.

On Thursday, March 9^th,  Ansley T. Erickson, a historian who focuses on educational inequality in U.S. and African American history, will be lecturing on “Making the Unequal Metropolis” at 4:15 p.m. in PAC 001 – the Hansel Lecture Hall.

Also on March 9^th, Creative Campus Fellow in Music and dynamic composer/performer Pamela Z will be presenting a sonic and visual experience, “Correspondence,” at the Ring Family Performing Arts Hall at 8 p.m.

If you get to New York, don’t miss frequent Wesleyan Visiting Artist Eiko’s ongoing performance and installation at St. John the Divine Church. Eiko has been working with historian/photographer William Johnston for years, and their current project on Fukishima is breathtaking. You can read more about it here.

After Spring Break there are more Women’s History Month related events on campus. Let me just mention a few. On Thursday, March 30^th Michelle Murphy will share her feminist techno-studies scholarship at 7 p.m. in PAC 001. Her Diane Weiss ’80 Memorial lecture is titled “Chemical Exposures and Decolonial Futures.”

On Friday, March 31 at 2 pm.. in Memorial Chapel, Reina Gossett, Donna Murch and Nikhil Pal Singh will join in a conversation titled “Race, Class and Gender After the Elections: Old Conflicts, New Hegemonies.”

There are many more events on campus, and practices by Wesleyans, that boldly aim for a more gender inclusive world. That’s work for the entire year.

Yesterday I received word that the men’s basketball team will be competing this weekend in the NCAA Div 3 basketball tournament. Congratulations to Coach Joe Reilly and all the guys on putting together the strong season that led to this invitation to participate in the national tournament. This is the second time in the last three years. The hoopsters play Union today (Friday, March 3) at 5:30 pm.

On Saturday, the men’s hockey team is moving on to the semi-finals of the NESCAC Championship, having gained a great upset victory over Colby College last weekend. Coach Chris Potter and his band of high flying skaters, who already have won the Little Three crown, are off to Hamilton, NY for the next NESCAC round, and we wish them all the best.

Speaking of all the best, dual-sport athlete and Middletown native, Devon Carrillo ’17, has been named Connecticut’s 2017 Male Athlete of the Year, as voted on by the Connecticut Sports Writers’ Alliance (CSWA). Carrillo is the first Wesleyan athlete to receive the prestigious award, which began in 1973. “This is a tremendous honor for Devon, Wesleyan and the city of Middletown,” said Wesleyan Director of Athletics Mike Whalen ’83. “He is an amazing athlete both on the football field and on the mat. After not wrestling for three years, Devon is now competing at a national level. This is truly a remarkable accomplishment!”

Excellence is something we see in many competitive arenas in athletics these days. Laila Samy ’18, a standout on the women’s squash team, was recently named the 2017 NESCAC Player of the Year! Her athleticism and determination are amazing to behold! In 2016 she was named an All-American, and she continues to compete in the national tournament this month. She is joined at the national championships by seniors Chris Hart and David Sneed.

Speaking of athleticism and championships, our frosh swimmer Caroline Murphy has had a truly amazing year. Caroline became the first-ever member of the women’s swim team to win a NESCAC Championship (50-yard backstroke).  She, along with Hannah O’Halloran (another frosh and another backstroker), will be competing in the NCAA’s this weekend.

Spring sports are getting started, but let’s take a moment to cheer our Cardinal athletes for their fall and winter successes!

This morning the newspapers carried yet another ominous headline: the Trump administration has rescinded protections for transgender students. I am not the right person to weigh in on the legal issues here, and in any case there are plenty of thoughtful people doing so already. I do want to say that as president of a residential university, withdrawing protections from people who are vulnerable to discrimination and abuse is a failure of moral obligation, and of imagination. It is shameful and hurtful.

At Wesleyan, we will continue to ensure that our transgender students receive all the protections necessary to secure their equal participation in the life of the university.

Last summer, I sat next to transgender activist, writer and alumna Jennifer Boylan ’80 at a talk by then Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Ms. Lynch underscored the importance of the civil rights issues at stake in regard to the federal government’s work with transgender Americans. Addressing the transgender community directly, she emphasized “we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

It just so happens that Ms. Boylan and Alexander Chee ‘89 will be speaking at Wesleyan next week. On Friday, March 3 at the Smith Reading Room at Olin Library, they will be reading from their recent work and discussing queer politics on campus and beyond.

Let’s make the same commitment to any vulnerable members of our community that Attorney General Lynch made to transgender people: We see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.

Pankaj Mishra’s new book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, will be the subject of his Jacob Julien Lecture at Wesleyan on Wednesday, March 1 at 8 p.m. at the Russell House. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Guardian, Mishra is an award winning fiction writer, intellectual historian and political commentator. I reviewed his latest book recently in the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Anger is the order of the day. Around the globe — from the cold-blooded killers of the Islamic State to Polish patriots fearful of cultural contamination, from Hindu chauvinists in India to immigrant bashers in America — resentment is boiling over into rage. Populist passions naturally target scapegoats that are local, so the variety is staggering; but behind the specificities of bigotry, Pankaj Mishra sees a general phenomenon. The story of progress guiding modernity assumed that the march forward was universal. When people feel themselves left behind, when they see that progress exists but not for them, they get very, very angry.

Mishra’s new book, “Age of Anger,” is a history of the present, a diagnosis that traces the violence of today to patterns set down in 18th century France and then repeated around the world as peoples deal with modernization and the loss of tradition. The outlines of this diagnosis were sketched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the decades just before the French Revolution. While cosmopolitan intellectuals like Voltaire were expressing faith in the inevitability of positive change, Rousseau saw a society that was fostering accelerated inequality — a society that was manufacturing vanity and resentment but no moral basis on which to build solidarity or community. Rousseau realized early on that the rich would use the power of the state to increase their own privileges, and he wrote on behalf of those who would be victimized by the new elites. “In the movement from victimhood to moral supremacy,” Mishra writes, “Rousseau enacted the dialectic of ressentiment that has become commonplace in our time.”

As modernization became a globalized phenomenon, resistance to it took the form of cultural nationalism. This began with the resistance of German-speaking Europe to Napoleon’s export of civilization at the point of a bayonet. It continued with resistance to attempts to “open markets” or to “liberate the potential” of a region that had yet to participate in the modern dispensation of inquiry, trade and communication. Those who found the pursuit of wealth empty of personal or social meaning (and those who were just not very good at the game of accumulation) often turned to their local traditions as a bulwark against modern modes of rationality. Nationalism was born from a feeling of being disrespected or simply left behind. In countries whose elites thought they had to “catch up” with the vanguard of economic or cultural change, there was often a counter-movement of people who felt they had to return to national roots in order to fend off change they found threatening.

Mishra, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, tells the reader that he began this book after Hindu nationalists came to power in India and finished it just after the election of Donald Trump. He chillingly describes how Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin justified his crime by appealing to militant Hindu traditions betrayed by the apostle of nonviolence. Today, those traditions — embraced by the current Indian government – are leading once more to violence and scapegoating. Mishra sees the pattern occurring again and again: in late 19th century Russia, in early 20th century Italy, in late 20th century Islamic countries and in contemporary America. Large groups of people reject modernity and look backward to a time when their land was supposedly pure, when their people were supposedly great. “Nationalism,” Mishra writes, “has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness.”

Modernizing societies have no antidote to this void of meaning, Mishra thinks, because they don’t have the resources to generate sentiments of solidarity for their citizens. The pursuit of democracy and equality fails to satisfy because the dynamic of historical change always produces new hierarchies and resentments. There has been no shortage of thinkers who have talked about this — from Nietzsche to Dostoevsky, from European fascists to democrats who wanted to decolonize the minds of those once dominated by the West. Mishra cites a myriad of such authors, and although the breadth of his reading is impressive, his argument is chronologically scattershot and thematically repetitive.

Still, even if the book could have been streamlined, the theme bears repeating: Our current situation is recapitulating some of the most violent and dangerous episodes in modern history. Cultural nationalism at those moments was expressed as violent anarchism of the dispossessed, something we’ve seen in our own time in the terrorism of Timothy McVeigh, al Qaeda and the Islamic State. In “Age of Anger,” we see how easily frustration can spawn religions whose only core tenet is destruction.

“Nationalism,” Mishra writes, “is, more than ever before, a mystification, if not a dangerous fraud with its promise of making a country ‘great again’ and its demonization of the ‘other.’” Noting that we need a deeper understanding of our own complicity in suffering as well as a “transformative way of thinking,” he leaves readers with a dire diagnosis — not a recommended treatment. With powerful and worrisome insights into history, Pankaj Mishra has clarified our present. The future is up to us.

Age of Anger

A History of the Present

By Pankaj Mishra

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 406 pages; $27)